Howard Hawks got his first film job after a crash on a racetrack
To the critic Leonard Maltin, he was America's finest director that the public never quite knew by name. Howard Hawks, heir to a Midwestern paper fortune, broke into movies after a dirt-track collision with cinematographer Victor Fleming, and first directed at 21, when Mary Pickford's director simply failed to show up for work one day.
Hawks was born in Goshen, Indiana, in 1896 into one of the richest families in the Midwest, its money coming from milling and paper. The family moved to Pasadena for his mother's health, and he grew into a restless young man: a barnstorming pilot as a teenager, winner of the US Junior Tennis Championship at 18, and a Cornell engineering student remembered more for craps and drink than study, though he read popular novels voraciously.
In the summer of 1916 he was racing a Mercer car his grandfather had bought him when he met Fleming, reportedly after the two collided on a dirt track. That led to work as a prop boy on a Douglas Fairbanks picture, where he built a set himself when the designer was absent. On Marshall Neilan's The Little Princess he offered to direct a scene in Neilan's absence, and Pickford agreed. During the First World War he trained pilots, an experience he later drew on for aviation dramas such as The Dawn Patrol (1930); his service records burned in a 1973 archive fire, so only his own account survives.
Family money opened doors afterwards. A loan to Jack Warner, quickly repaid, earned him a producing job, and he co-founded Associated Producers, which made 14 films before its partners drifted apart in 1923. Irving Thalberg then recommended him as story editor at Famous Players–Lasky, where he oversaw more than 40 productions. He jumped to MGM on Thalberg's promise of a directing job, and quit in 1925 when the promise stalled.
What followed was remarkable range: gangster films like Scarface (1932), screwball comedy in Bringing Up Baby (1938), noir, science fiction and Westerns such as Rio Bravo (1959). His sharp-tongued, self-assured heroines became known as the Hawksian woman. Jean-Luc Godard ranked him the greatest of American artists, and admirers from Martin Scorsese to Greta Gerwig cite his influence. He won an Honorary Academy Award in 1974.
Source: Howard Hawks
